Playdough Props and Mats
Playdough is an excellent tool when creating a therapeutic activity. However, adding playdough props and mats can increase learning opportunities and further practice developmental skills!
At-Home Playdough Props
Providing small objects within your home for your child to play with while engaging in playdough can amplify the opportunities for a child to practice fine motor skills. Fine motor skills are essential for play and daily functional tasks. Fine motor skills are used when writing a child’s name, brushing their teeth, and many other tasks that require little hands or wrists.
Fine motor skill prop ideas:
Bottle caps
Combs or hairbrush
Cookie cutters
Buttons
Feathers
Spoon
Fork
Safety knife or a food scrapper (dependent on the child’s age)
Mason jar or rolling pin
String
Straws
Potato masher
Popsicle sticks
Rocks or pebbles
Leaves
Twigs
Pencil or pen
Playdough Mats
Playdough mats range from DIY lamination projects to entirely crafted silicon displays. All playdough mats effectively assist your child in development when they target essential social, emotional, literacy, and age-appropriate developmental skills. Playdough mats can help a child practice literacy skills, work comprehension, identifying shapes and colors, problem-solving skills, creativity, self-expression, and exploring emotions. Children fill in the “gaps” of the images provided on the Playdough mat, adding their own spin to the image- think about it as “coloring with Playdough.” Additionally, these mats can prompt the child, or instruct them to make shapes, letters, and other objects, further amplifying the therapeutic benefits.
Literacy Skills and Word Comprehension
Playdough mats that encourage a child to share a letter or spell their name are not only working on fine motor muscles, but literacy skills too. The child can practice shaping a specific letter and see its form.
Shape and Color Identification
Playdough mats that prompt the child to create a red circle, a green square, or a blue triangle are all examples of ways to develop color and shape identification. When your child reads the mat’s “instructions”, they are also working on word comprehension skills!
Self-expression
Playdough mats may allow a child to practice self-expression by creating themselves in the playdough. The mat may instruct the child to create a portrait using the stick-figured person printed on the mat. Furthermore, the playdough mat can ask your child to create images of their family, friends, and other individuals in their lives.
Exploring Emotion
Playdough mats may also teach your child different emotions, and provide a space for them to practice expressing and identifying emotions. The playdough mat could have a blank face on it, and the mat’s “instructions” may ask a child to make a sad face using playdough. When your child is creating the sad playdough face, it illustrates how to read others' emotions and express their own!
Problem-solving and Creativity
Problem-solving skills and creativity are intertwined in all of the playdough mat prompts above. If the child doesn’t have a particular playdough color, how would they make it? This is one example of many that may arise when a child engages with playdough and props, testing and strengthening the child’s creativity and problem-solving skills.
The Christmas season is upon us! Decorations are changing from autumn-orange to pine-tree-green. Along with the changing decor, SENSE-ational Spaces provides Christmas-themed playdough mats! Enjoy this holiday season from us at SENSE-ational Spaces! Children fill in the “gaps” of the images in the Playdough mat provided by SENSE-ational Spaces. Children can add red buttons to the gingerbread or a green bow tie to the present, all provided on the different printout playdough mats.
These images are printable playdough mats. One thing required is to print off the images on letter-size paper and laminate them! No laminator? Just lay the parchment paper over the printed images and enjoy the fun!
Click the link to redirect you to the SENSE-ational Spaces’ playdough mats!
Free for the month of December when you use this CODE: HOLIDOH100